Last Bite Hotel adds eerie vibes—and a bit of strategy—to a typical Food Network show (2025)

On Last Bite Hotel, Food Network’s newest competition, eight chefs travel to an empty hotel to become the kitchen staff, working for hotel manager Tituss Burgess, who’s been waiting for them to come play his game for so long he starts gnawing through the scenery immediately.

“On to my favorite news—the bad news,” he cackles after the first challenge. “An elimination already? I am pure evil!”

This is goofy, barely spooky fun. “The steaks are high, but the steaks are even higher,” he says, as a stack of bloody meat is shown. In the intro, he wipes blood stains off the wall before the camera drifts downward to show a bottle of ketchup.

Burgess is not in character so much as he’s just a character. “The hotel never forgets,” he says, his eyes drifting off to the distance. Later, he sets a table as if he’s in a trance.

Burgess previously hosted one of Quibi’s best competitions, Dishmantled, but here he has more time to throw jokes and bits out to see what sticks. And I mean that literally: “I went off the rails, and [producers] welcomed it,” he told TV Insider, adding “I just thought, Let me see how many things I can throw against the wall.”

Last Bite Hotel’s vibe is The Traitors meets Disney’s Haunted Mansion, with just the lightest hint of horror. There’s no real overarching idea. Is the hotel sentient? Does the trike mean it’s the same location as The Shining? Is Tituss Burgess a ghost? Do eliminated chefs die and haunt the others? Eh, knows.

That said, it’s far more successful at scene-setting than, say, Halloween Baking Championship, which is just in the same, familiar studio kitchen that’s lightly redecorated and reused for Holiday Baking Championship. This is actually being filmed outside of a soundstage, in a mansion/bed-and-breakfast-ish house somewhere.

Under the surface of this dramatic staging, Last Bite Hotel (Food Network, Tuesdays at 9) does have familiar elements: two challenges, a guest judge, cooking in teams, competing for $25,000, et cetera.

The eight contestants, who Tituss Burgess introduces as “some of the best chefs in the country,” are mostly familiar Food Network and/or Tournament of Champions regulars: Tobias Dorzon, Kevin Lee, Gabriella Baldwin, and Aarthi Sampath, plus Top Chef turned Food Network stars Brittanny Anderson, Byron Gomez, and Nini Nguyen. The final contestant is Graham Campbell from Netflix’s Final Table.

The judges also include many of the usual faces: Esther Choi, Cat Cora, Jose Garces, Alex Guarnaschelli, Judy Joo, Poppy O’Toole, Marcus Samuelsson, Michael Symon, and Andrew Zimmern.

But there’s also something more tantalizing happening than the standard cooking competition at Last Bite Hotel.

Besides the theming, what sets it apart—and makes it more intriguing—is restriction. Each chef brings just 13 ingredients for the entire competition. That’s all they can use for the entire competition; run out or break something, and that’s it. (The producers provide a pantry of just salt, pepper, and oil.)

Nini, for example, has selected chicken and eggs as her protein, and also brought limes, cilantro, jalapenos, spring onions, ginger, garlic, sugar, jasmine rice, coconut cream, panangcurrypaste, and fish sauce.

Some chefs have been more strategic: Brittanny brought an entire suckling pig that she crams into the refrigerator, plus heavy cream from which she thinks she can make butter. Her other items are striped bass, eggs, sweet potatoes, green cabbage, fennel, lemons, garlic, parsley, Castelvetranoolives, Calabrianchilis, and anchovies in oil.

That gives the show and its challenge teams a lot to work with. The first challenge is a single bite, but the chefs have to choose carefully what they cook with, because once they use something up, it’s gone.

The chefs split into two teams for the second challenge, and team captains aren’t just choosing which chefs they want to work with, but what ingredients they’ll have. Each chef has to decide what to contribute, and whether to give up something they might have wanted to conserve.

Last Bite Hotel—I keep wanting to write Last Chance Kitchen—won’t be holding each chef to their original 13 ingredients. Tituss has also said that chefs may trade and barter with each other in the future, and the eliminated chef’s ingredients are distributed among the others.

The first eliminated chef (who I guessed before they even started cooking; hello, Food Network cannon fodder) chooses which chef gets first dibs, who picks the next chef, and so on. This isn’t Survivor, but there is some light strategy involved in all of this, and especially stretching that across a season makes for an interesting premise.

The show comes from Butternut Media, the production company run by former Food Network president Courtney White, which previously produced Next Baking Master: Paris, another show that’s not set in a studio.

Like that series, it uses its location well, but also crams the chefs into a small kitchen, which is the kind of restriction that annoys me even on Top Chef. That show also focused more on interpersonal drama.

Last Bite Hotel is just six episodes, and if it can stick with what it established in the first, remixing the opportunities that the 13 ingredient conceit provides in different ways without devolving into silliness or melodrama, it’ll be a terrific addition to Food Network’s competition rotation, and one that doesn’t need to be tied to the pre-Halloween season, either.